Communications of the ACM
Agencies Bring Energy Modeling Out of the Lab
The new BIRDS system will help building professionals evaluate whether going beyond the current code would result in energy savings that exceed the initial investment in energy upgrades.
Credit: Baum/NIST
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) system, a database and software to help building professionals evaluate whether going beyond the current code would result in energy savings that exceed the initial investment in energy upgrades.
BIRDS is a Web-based application designed for sustainability performance comparisons for 11 different U.S. commercial building types. BIRDS measures building operating energy use through energy simulations, building materials use through life-cycle material inventories, and building costs over time. The system also includes integrated metrics, gauges the sustainability of materials and energy usage, assesses carbon footprints and 11 other indicators of environmental performance, and measures economic costs over nine investment horizons.
Meanwhile, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers have developed Autotune calibration software, which reduces the amount of time and expertise needed to optimize building parameters for cost and energy savings. The researchers developed Autotune using the Titan supercomputer to perform millions of simulations for a wide range of building types. "We had to use supercomputing resources to create all the metadata used to train the software, but the Autotune software that will be available to the public doesn't require all these high-performance resources," notes ORNL researcher Jibonananda Sanyal.
From Government Computer News
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found